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For my Beauty and the Beast celebration I decided to experiment with something new to me and use fondant. It was easy! although I kept leaving nail-marks in the fondant…but my childhood dedication to the art of Play-Doh has finally paid off. I made three kinds of decorations, inspired by two of the things that strike me as most important in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and which happen to be two of my favorite things in the world: Roses and books.

The first is a closed book, and this is how it was made:

I used Wilton’s fondant in white, and Wilton’s icing coloring to tint it. Other useful and necessary items: A rolling pin, toothpicks, a cutting board, and a sharp knife. It’s also a good idea to have a container with a lid or a zip-lock bag handy for any fondant that you aren’t using, because it will dry out if you leave it exposed for more than a few minutes. It’s also important to make sure that your hands and your work surface are clean and completely free of lint or crumbs–any bit of dust will stick to your fondant and look vile (especially against the white).

The first step is to shape a piece of white fondant into a thick rectangle for the body of the book–exact dimensions aren’t particularly important, and it doesn’t need to have sharp corners or perfectly flat sides, just squish into shape–

With your knife, make shallow cuts along three of the sides to give the appearance of pages–I got the cleanest cuts when I used a gentle sawing motion (rather than just dragging the knife across).

Set your pages aside for the moment, and get a fresh piece of fondant and your icing coloring. You can use any color you like–I used blue because in the film the cover of Belle’s favorite book is blue (…and it is my favorite color. And we already had it in the house).

Use a toothpick to put a little coloring on your fondant–you will not need very much. Just dip the tip of the toothpick into the coloring once and smear it on the fondant and you will have plenty–you can always continue to add color if you decide that you want it to be darker (although I found that the more color you add, the stickier and more obnoxious your fondant will get).

Work the color into the fondant with your hands–it will stain your fingers temporarily (see my dainty pink hands? that was from tinting the fondant for the roses!) so if you’re a hand model then you may want to wear disposable gloves, or buy pre-colored fondant. I found that the best way to minimize staining was to fold the fondant over the coloring, and to keep folding until most of the color was incorporated–

Once the color was worked in a bit I switched to rolling the fondant between my palms until I was satisfied that the color was uniform (not marbled or spotty). Then I rolled it out–

Oops.

Peel the fondant off of your rolling pin and lay it out on your cutting board. You don’t want your book cover to be too thin, or it will be difficult to work with–the regulation 1/8 of an inch is about right, but there’s no need to worry about being exact (…I hope that no one ever crouches over their table with a ruler because of me. I don’t believe in being exact, as a rule. Ha ha). Set the white fondant pages that you made earlier on your blue fondant and use them as a guide for cutting the cover of the book to size–

You want to make sure that the resulting strip of fondant is the right length to wrap around your pages, so you’ll use the same trick that you doubtless use to cut wrapping paper (when I was little I thought that my mother invented the wrapping paper trick, and I thought that she was the cleverest person in the world. I was right, she is, but not because she came up with the wrapping paper trick). Just roll your pages over to get the combined length of endpage, spine, endpage, and then trim the last edge to fit–

And then fold it around your pages

Use a clean toothpick to make a crease on each side of the spine, pressing the spine flat as you do so

You could stop here and have a recognizably book-shaped lump of fondant, but I added four more grooves on the spine of the book–

Rather than just pressing the toothpick into the fondant, I rubbed it back and forth gently for a more distinct mark.